The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Page 13
Part of the reason my Cold War lectures always fail to reduce the children to petrified silence, damn them, is that anticlimactic ending: it comes across like some forty-five-year game of Risk where the last two players broodingly accumulate huge armies, before even they get bored and go to bed. But in truth, and largely in secret, we came close to full-blown nuclear war more than once in the Eighties. Had I known how close, I’d have started on the Kestrel at breakfast. Though Reagan’s mindlessly provocative evil-empire rhetoric was just that, it convinced Yuri Andropov – his short-lived Soviet counterpart, and predecessor to the even shorter-lived Chernenko – that America genuinely intended an aggressive nuclear strike. If you want a calmly rational, long-term overview of risk, don’t ask a terminally ill ex-head of the KGB.
When NATO launched a nine-day war-game exercise codenamed Able Archer, Andropov and his hand-picked team of hardwired paranoiacs convinced themselves it was the cover for a surprise attack. After double agents relayed this conviction to their Western handlers, it was initially dismissed as posturing bluff; the CIA was reluctantly persuaded otherwise, and at the last minute the exercise was scaled down. Documents that surfaced after the Soviet Union’s collapse have shown just how crucial this intervention was in averting unfathomable disaster: ‘I don’t think the Russians were crying wolf,’ said the CIA’s former director of intelligence. The KGB’s ex-chief of foreign counter-intelligence later offered a chilling summary of Andropov’s strategic mood at this time: ‘The Americans are ready to attack, so we better attack first.’
That was in November 1983. Two months earlier, and weeks after that Korean 747 was shot down, a duty officer monitoring the Soviet’s missile warning system at a base near Moscow received an automated alert: a satellite had detected the launch of five intercontinental ballistic missiles from a site in Montana. One can only imagine Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov’s state of mind as he digested this information, but we all owe him a Kestrel. Rather than instantly transmit the warning up the chain of command as per his orders, Petrov checked the ground radar and other data for any further evidence of incoming missiles, and having found none opted to keep the news to himself. His bold twin assumptions: the Americans would surely have fired more than five warheads in a first-strike scenario, and in any case the alert was probably a false alarm generated by Russia’s dependably undependable technology. (It was the latter, of course – a report would conclude that the satellite had been confused by ‘a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds’.)
Had Petrov adhered to protocol, it is widely agreed that Andropov’s doddering, jittery finger would have jabbed The Button. As a reward for saving the world (and in particular saving Britain, which we now know would have been obliterated more entirely than any other nation), Petrov was later reprimanded for filing incomplete paperwork. He suffered a breakdown soon after and took early retirement.
Petrov’s workplace would, I supposed, have been very like Little Star. With an air of sombre reflection that soon degenerated into the base glee of illicitly poking about in derelict secret stuff, I trundled back down the telescope’s service road to inspect the staff apartment blocks. At the foot of the nearest I rested the MIFA against a black hole that had once been a door, then strode inside with the enthusiasm of a man unaware that Little Star’s erstwhile caretaker had been brutally murdered by squatters the previous year.
Beneath the entrance stairwell, newsprint poked out from under a pile of masonry; after kicking it away I was presented with a mildewed sheaf of Pravdas, the official Soviet journal. All were dated 1992, and topped with a masthead that married a hammer and sickle with the bald and goateed father of the revolution. My withered grasp of Cyrillic offered up no more than a headline with something strident to say about Americanskis.
A crunchy carpet of glass and plaster led me into a small bare room, patchily wallpapered with magazine pages. Nearly all depicted young women in fur hats, thick jumpers and long coats, smiling politely in front of snow-sprinkled civilian machinery: a steam locomotive, a Moskvich saloon, a lorry full of logs. Lining paper or pin-up erotica? These images had all the sizzling pornographic charge of my mother’s old sewing patterns.
I gazed around, and through the mean little window that overlooked the matching ruin opposite. Even allowing for the looted dishevelment, everything seemed so shoddy and dated. Until the 1960s, the Soviets had almost kept pace with Western economies – rationing in Czechoslovakia and even Romania ended long before it did in Britain – but that was as far as they got. All the trappings of life on display here – the bog-paper newsprint and its drab typography, the primly wrapped-up dolly-birds, the lumpen architecture and hectoring, humourless propaganda – belonged to a time before I was born.
All at once my thoughts on the Soviet Union and the Cold War crystallised, the not terribly profound and the bleeding obvious coalescing with a clearly audible schloop. Soviet rule in these countries was a ruthless foreign occupation: they sent millions to the Gulag, murdered millions more, imposed a totalitarian police state that suppressed all opposition, and fenced off vast areas like this for their own malevolent ends. I wondered why people – people like me – seem so tirelessly fascinated with those what-if ruminations on how things might have panned out had the Nazis won the war: very simply, it would have panned out just like this. Yet that was hardly the fault of the Russian in the street, so why had I generally feared and despised him? It could only be my formative conditioning: to the Kestrel-fuelled youth in me, the boy who curled up with his short-wave radio and listened to creepy propaganda jingles, Russians were still the baddies. That was clearly an unfair conflation, especially as the Soviet Union was no more. And though this base was a derelict ruin, I’d hardly be allowed to poke around in the many US equivalents that still operated right across the world, with superior leisure facilities and ruder pin-ups.
Here’s the rather sinister postscript, though. When the Russians disabled Little Star’s giant radio telescope, they didn’t do a terribly thorough job. A team of largely amateur astronomers managed to get the thing up and running again within two years, repurposed for the greater civil good to track asteroids and so forth. Many observers have pointed out the many simple ways in which the Russians could have permanently crippled the device – for instance by smashing out one of the giant ball bearings it revolves on – and pooh-poohed the suggestion that it was too big to blow up. The astronomers who restored it found that the cables had been severed with precision and some artifice, a very mannered sabotage that begged to be undone. The implication was clear, and delivered in fluent Arnie-speak: we’ll be back.
Pedalling down to the gatehouse with my mind largely blown, I approached an old red minibus full of familiar faces. A generic familiarity, soon confirmed by the number plates: these were the first British people I had met since leaving home. I excitedly flagged it down and treated the grey-haired driver to a stream of animated gabble, asking if they had come to see the big dish which I hoped they had as it was pretty bloody incredible as in fact this whole site was and really how amazing that we had met here of all places kind of behind enemy lines ha-ha and slightly silly as it may seem I had ridden this bike all the way from Norway like the very top of Norway and was … was going … um …
The driver hadn’t even lowered the window. More than that, he was fixing me through it with a cold look that I now noted also adorned the half-dozen middle-aged faces behind. Well, I thought, feeling my ears redden, sod you lot then. I remounted, wounded and confused, and as I did so suddenly recalled seeing a very similar minibus at some point in the recent past. The precise moment of this encounter was pinpointed by a female voice that now asserted itself through a wound-down window.
‘We’re astronomers,’ it announced stiffly. ‘I believe we passed you on the way in.’
A more muffled but even colder voice chimed in from somewhere further inside the van. ‘By the gatehouse. Charming.’
The balance of Latvia came tinged
with melancholy and the ghosts of better days, or at least busier ones. Ventspils is apparently the largest port in the Baltics, yet its docks conveyed only the hollow bustle of a Legoland diorama, full of container ships and mile-long goods trains but very little evidence of individual human activity. So many former sources of Soviet mass employment, I realised, were now automated and mechanised. Others were simply vacated: Karosta once hummed with uniformed life and leaking radiation from its resident fleet of nuclear submarines, but when the base closed in 1994, 20,000 Russians went home and left a landscape full of roofless barracks and stumbling solvent enthusiasts. The bloke who sold me a pizza in the town up the road spoke excitedly of a regeneration plan, but I’m not sure what the prospects are for a place that translates as War Port. Nor indeed for a scheme to reinvent his own rather careworn home as a holiday resort: ‘We call Liepaja “The city where the wind is born”.’
Its history was aptly bleak. As one of the first cities captured by the Nazis after they turned on Stalin, Liepaja suffered a pioneering fate that would become grimly familiar as my journey continued, a horror story told in memorials dotted along the windswept dunes. When war broke out, just 1 per cent of Germany’s population was Jewish; the vast majority of Jews who died in the Holocaust were East European. So keen was the SS to embark on its ideological mission that Liepaja’s Jews were being rounded up and shot even as the battle for control of the city still raged. Later, when the massacres began in earnest, German officers travelled from afar to witness them; sometimes more than a hundred ‘execution tourists’ would attend, arriving early to secure the best view. On a single day in December 1941, more than 2,700 Liepaja Jews were frogmarched out to the dunes at Skede, and forced to strip naked in front of a kilometre-long trench. Listed on the execution-squad staff roster was a ‘kicker’, whose job was to thus transfer victims into the trench after they had been shot in the head.
It was hard to look anyone in the face after standing at these sites, even my own in the mirror: how dreadful to admit membership of a species that did such things to its own kind in living memory. Yet some Balts couldn’t wait: anti-Semitism was so entrenched in certain areas that Jews were being massacred even before the Nazi invasion. By the end of 1943, Liepaja’s pre-war Jewish population had been reduced from 5,700 to precisely three; of the 350,000 Jews who called the Baltics home in 1939, only 6 per cent would survive the war. No other Jewish community suffered more.
My ride had reached a new phase, though I couldn’t sense what it was just yet. Looking back, I seemed to have got through Finland and Russia on a messy blend of bewildered shock, mortal terror and eye of tiger: just a man and his will to survive. But staring out these blowy Baltic ordeals of sand and pine required a more measured approach. With 3,200km on the clock I’d already travelled further under my own steam in one go than I ever had in my life, but the halfway point was still a fortnight off and the infinite coniferous vistas were a constant drain on morale. Ahead lay many long, dark days of the soul, a journey into uncharted personal territory that would draw deep on unplumbed reserves of determination and indomitability. I was levering open the filthy old tins at the back of my ransacked inner pantry, swallowing the iffy contents and waiting to find out if I’d be nourished or poisoned.
Routines, no matter how witless, became comforting to the point of addiction. Whatever I’d been doing had somehow got me this far, so I needed to carry on doing it: yelling the first line of the Beatles’ ‘Good Morning’ every time a cock crowed; entombing my lunch in the Houdini-grade double-elastic-strapped front carrier rather than the quick-release rear panniers; wearing my awful, baggy hi-vis tabard even on an afternoon spent wobbling down a deserted woodland footpath. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; if I ain’t dead, don’t kill me.
You put your left leg round, your right leg round, round-round-round-round UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE. These were the treadmill weeks, when fatigue duked it out with monotony. I’d spent so long imprisoned in the Eurasian boreal forest that its dark, coniferous immensity had long since stopped scaring me: it seemed more appropriate to have learned that ‘pining’ was derived from the Latin word poena, or punishment, and indeed that these woods were named in honour of Boreas, Greek god of the north wind. Wanker.
Self-entertainment became a mounting challenge as I plumb-lined through the parallel pines. The old ‘guess how fast you’re going without looking at the speedo’ game didn’t occupy me for long: these days I was never more than 0.5kmh out. An attempt to cultivate an interest in conifer variations stalled at ‘those spindly ones with the slightly more orangey bark at the top’. It was no better when the trees opened into a muddy, prone continuum, like a family-sized pack of the flat and featureless square kilometre of Lincolnshire beet-land I once visited to assess the Ordnance Survey’s judgement on it as Britain’s most boring spot. For mad hours I adapted and loudly delivered lyrical musings on being a real nowhere man riding through his nowhere land, or finding myself several thousand light years from home. My internal jukebox was already down to its dregs, and when a tune got stuck on repeat it was never a good one: I spent a terrible afternoon in the head-scarfed smallholdings with Level 42’s ‘Lessons in Love’ for company. Part of me died that day.
I took to ordering the most dreadful-sounding dishes on the evening menu as a stimulating experiment to probe the interface between hunger and revulsion, but hunger always won: the project was cancelled after I wolfed down a tureen of Grey Latvian Peas in their colour-coded tripe broth. Most productively I finessed the rules of Duomatic Roulette, a diversion I had been dabbling with since the sun came out. You will need: one shit bike, one sore arse, one wit’s end and one Fichtel & Sachs Torpedo Duomatic two-speed automatic hub. To play, stand up in the saddle to procure temporary relief of perineal distress, then sit down and recommence pedalling. If you now find yourself in the higher of your two gears, th … Actually, scratch that. The reality is that no matter what the laws of probability have to say, you somehow don’t ever find yourself in the gear you want to be in, especially on hills, and that to avoid the resultant wobbly humiliation you should therefore never stop pedalling. I agree this doesn’t make Duomatic Roulette sound especially rewarding. Nonetheless, I sometimes played it a hundred times a day. Holy Joe Stalin, I was losing it.
The weekends were an even lonelier inducement to pre-senile dementia. I spent one bereft Sunday morning reminiscing about my childhood Raleigh Twenty with such evocative intensity that I found myself twisting the MIFA’s handlebar grips for a phantom Sturmey-Archer gear-change. Where was everyone? Even the bigger towns seemed dim and dead on a Friday night, their broad pavements empty and the roads sparsely patrolled by young men in pimped-down old BMWs. Saturdays were slightly better. Families harvesting roadside litter in a very socialistic-era civic spring clean; trim matrons plucking new-season herbs from the footpath edges; a drunk splendidly belting out opera arias outside a supermarket. In Liepaja I passed a groom lugging his hefty bride across a bridge amid a chorus of cheers and horn-parps, in accordance with a tradition that must have been rather less onerous in the under-fed days of yore: the pizza bloke told me that husbands were required to carry their new wives over no less than seven local river crossings.
Most notably, Saturday was the only time I got to ride along with other cyclists, even if they were all six. As I slalomed through all those pink snowsuits and stabilisers, I fancied myself firing many a young imagination: ‘Daddy, I’ll never forget the morning when you were teaching me to ride, and that man went past us on a little bike with oven gloves on the handlebars, and you said: “If you try, if you really push yourself, one day you’ll be able to buy a car and never, ever have to look that utterly desperate and pathetic.’”
8. LITHUANIA AND KALININGRAD
The Curonian Spit has always intrigued me on the map, a slender appendage curving out from the Lithuanian coast like a hundred-kilometre comma. A beguiling wreath of greasy mist hardly diminished the enigma. I wound between murky pines
huddled beneath a steepling dune that hid the undiscovered remains of a great Viking city. Beyond lay one of the world’s longest beaches, but when curiosity drove me to climb up the soft sand mountain for a peek, everything was swallowed in fog. Further along I rode through a dry-iced graveyard of blackened trunks, the aftermath of a huge forest fire (suggested headline: SPIT ROASTED). It was wonderfully eerie and as ever I had it all to myself.
This was once the northern tip of the German Reich, a colossal empire that at its 1918 peak padded out the big fat Fatherland with most of Poland and great chunks of the Baltic states. Frederick the Great settled 300,000 Prussian colonists along this coast in the late eighteenth century, and the more enterprising amongst them invented seaside holidays as we know them today: grand hotels and lodges lured Teutonic aristos and industrialists with the now-traditional promise of a brief and bracing toe-dip, rewarded by days of fat-faced indulgence. When the Soviets swallowed the spit, so to speak, they refashioned it as a people’s playground, but rather pleasingly repurposed most of the old buildings rather than knocking them down. The Communist authorities’ sensitive respect for cultural heritage was a perennial surprise. Warsaw’s shattered medieval old town, for instance, was rebuilt with painstaking attention to detail: ‘The house I was born in had been violently destroyed,’ wrote one astonished resident, ‘but I can now go into the bedroom I had as a boy, and look out at the exact same window at the exact same house across the courtyard. There’s even a lamp bracket with a curious twist hanging in the same place.’ A Stalin-led invasion of post-war Britain might not have been entirely welcome, but had it happened we’d all be much less fat and Coventry would look a lot better.